Saturday, 28 November 2015

Time, again!

Do you ever get the feeling that you will never have enough time? I
don’t mean just in terms of your expected lifespan, I mean to do all the
things that you want to do. I am beginning to feel that way. It is a
strange sensation. It gives rise to feelings of frustration, stress,
exasperation, futility and even, to some degree, melancholia. Now I
believe myself to be by nature an optimist. I am also quite positive and
reasonably confident, but I must admit that I have had my brushes with
depression as well. I expect most people have. I do not think, however,
that my recent moods have anything to do with that.

No, I do not. Looking back at this last year I seem to have
accomplished an awful lot. I have traveled to Norway, a country new to
me, and experienced the joys of a sea cruise. I have been learning to
drive, successfully, and even recently bought my first car. I love cars.
I have admired them from an early age, so actually getting to own one
is quite a wonderful thing. Okay, my car is only a Vauxhall Corsa, not
an E-Type Jaguar, but the thing is, it is my car. Soon I will be taking
my practical driving test and, hopefully, I will pass and get to indulge
another long held ambition, driving on my own.

Also, I recently went to see U2 for the third time and it was a
fantastic concert. One experience included with many more. It has been a
good year for experiences. Oh, and I also bought a hat. A small thing
perhaps but even the small things add to the accumulative total of
everything that we get to do.

That said I have also experienced a significant degree of
frustration. One area has been at work, but I am not going to write too
much about that. I am a wage slave, nothing more, and, again, probably
just like many other people are. That fact was reinforced recently by
various incidents and decisions at work where it was made blatantly
obvious that it is not what you know but who you know. Enough said. Next
year I can take early retirement if my financial situation supports
such a decision. It does not at the moment but that could change. I hope
that it does.

Putting all that aside, another area that has proved frustrating is
writing. It is not as if I am struggling for ideas or anything, in fact
it is the opposite. I have lots of good ideas all waiting to see the
light of day, but I lack the time to do anything about them. I was
hoping to have my third novel out this year but that has not happened.
The book is in review mode at the moment, I am pouring over the grammar
and spelling, trying to get it smoothed out and polished. I am also
rewriting and editing a few pieces to raise the tempo a little. It is a
lot of work for one person to take on but then that is the fate of the
independent author. I am not playing the violin here, I do not want
sympathy. I chose to become a writer while holding down a full-time job,
I still hope that it will take over as my primary occupation, but I am
lacking a very valuable asset, perhaps the most valuable that any of us
can own; time!

Currently my working days are twelve hours long, including traveling
time. Unfortunately I cannot read when traveling, it makes me feel sick,
so even though I have a tablet I cannot use it in the four hours I
spend commuting. Stupid travel sickness. By the time I get home, have
dinner, wash the pots if it is my turn, I am usually too tired to bother
with my laptop. More often I am just left with the weekends but lately,
for some reason, even those appear to have been eaten up by other
necessary activities. Curiously, I cannot recall what they are. Probably
something mundane, grocery shopping, oiling door hinges, things like
that. The fact is that each one eats into my precious time.

There is no real solution to this of course, well, not one that I am
likely to accept. I like being a married man with a family. I love my
wife. I do not believe that all housework is ‘woman’s work’, I live
there as well so I do my share of the chores. I also enjoy cooking; I
will be doing that this weekend. Nope, I am not considering a life on my
own even if that might seem to promise more time for writing.

I am hoping that when I get my full licence the fact that my
commuting time will reduce from four hours a day to only one will lead
to me recovering some precious time. I will be coming home at a more
amenable time of the day and with higher energy levels. I like that
thought. Also, I will be able to undertake chores like grocery shopping
anytime that they are required, because I will have a car. I will be
able to consciously move such shopping from the weekends, which will
then be free, to a time immediately after work when I am already on my
way home.

In the great scheme of things I am not going to win back a lot of
time, I know that. Realistically it would take one of two things to
happen, such as winning a substantial prize on the lottery or one of my
two books that are already published suddenly turning into a million
copy best seller! Well I can dream, which is quite fortunate because it
is my dreams that I turn into stories, if only I had enough time to
commit all of them to paper!